A Rose For Emily Literary Analysis

One of the mothers, Lindo Jong, was so desperate to cling to her Chinese past that she criticized her daughter Waverly’s relationship with her boyfriend, despite she herself having being forced into an arranged marriage at a young age. As a teenager, Lindo was abandoned by her own family after a flood and left behind to live with her husband-to-be’s strict family. She had no choice in the matter and spent her time planning a way to escape. After she succeeded in fleeing and emigrated to America, she began to raise a family of her own with a husband of her choice. This time, she was able to pick her own husband and ended up being much happier. However, she was unable to let go of her Chinese past and insisted on criticizing Waverly’s boyfriend, Rich. Even though Waverly was with a man who made her happy for the first time in her life, she fretted: “But I worried for Rich. Because I knew my feelings for

Instructed to abandon her intellectual life and avoid stimulating company, she sinks into a still-deeper depression invisible to her husband, which is also her doctor, who believes he knows what is best for her. Alone in the yellow-wallpapered nursery of a rented house, she descends into madness. Everyday she keeps looking at the torn yellow wallpaper. While there, she is forbidden to write in her journal, as it indulges her imagination, which is not in accordance with her husband's wishes. Despite this, the narrator makes entries in the journal whenever she has the opportunity. Through these entries we learn of her obsession with the wallpaper in her bedroom. She is enthralled with it and studies the paper for hours. She thinks she sees a woman trapped behind the pattern in the paper. The story reaches its climax when her husband must force his way into the bedroom, only to find that his wife has pulled the paper off the wall and is crawling around the perimeter of the room.

The mood of the story shifted from nervous, anxious, hesitant even, to tense and secretive, and shifts again to paranoid and determination. Her anxiousness is evident whenever she talks to John. She always seems to think for lengthy time when attempting to express her concerns about her condition to him. The mood shift from anxious to secretive is clear when she writes “I had no intention of telling him it was BECAUSE of the wall-paper.” (9). She wants no one to figure out the affect the wallpaper has on her and she wants to be the only one to figure out its pattern. The final mood shift to determination is obvious when she writes “But I am here, and no person must touch this paper but me – not ALIVE!” (11). She is steadfast in attempting to free the woman from the wallpaper. She even goes as far as to lock herself in the room to make sure that she is not interrupted. The major conflicts of this story are the narrator versus John over the nature of her illness and its treatment and the narrator’s internal struggle to express herself and claim independence. During the entire story her and John’s views about her treatment conflict with each other, especially when it comes to her writing. He even makes her stay in the room upstairs instead of in a prettier room downstairs that she would prefer. She often keeps her views to herself or writes them down in

She becomes obsessed with the pattern, trying to trace it with her eyes, but in her intense study of the paper she finds that “There are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will.” What she sees in the wallpaper becomes her secret, something that she can keep from her husband, and without his controlling influence, she is able to find an escape within the wallpaper. Now she no longer sleeps at night because she lies awake and studies the wallpaper’s pattern, what was once an ugly piece of “paper” now, metaphorically becomes her

Either way Miss Emily had an issue of clinginess. For three days after her father’s death, she refused to believe that he was gone. She also kept Homers body for ten years, maybe because she was upset that her father was taken away. Although Emily’s father rejected any man that she brought over, perhaps keeping Homer was a way to get what she always wanted, a man in her life. The reasons behind Emily’s psychological behaviors vary.

Women are all around treated differently than men, and especially in this time period. Emily was an older woman that had never been without a dominant, male figure in her life. Her father and the ex love of her life had always been there for her. This is when Homer Barron came into her life and she realized that she never wanted to lose him. Even though Emily was eventually with Homer, that did not mean she was lower in the social class because she was with a laborman.

The main symbolism running throughout A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner, is the theme of how important it is to let go of the past. Miss Emily clings to the past and does not want to be independent. The Old South is becoming the new South and she cannot move forward. The residents of the South did not all give in to change just because they lost the Civil War. In A Rose for Emily time marches on leaving Miss Emily behind as she stubbornly refuses to progress into a new era. In the story, symbolism is used to give more details than the author actually gives to the reader. Symbolism helps to indicate how Emily was once innocent but later changes, how her hair, house, and lifestyle, helped to show her resistance to change. The story is not

Within the story’s exposition the narrator is disgusted by the yellow wallpaper, yet as time goes on, she shows more and more interest in the wallpaper, eventually seeing a woman in the underlying pattern of the paper and immediately wanting to leave the house where she is being contained (225). This point in the story represents the narrator’s realization that she is trapped, which is what causes her to begin seeing a reflection of herself in the wallpaper. As the narrator's feeling of entrapment worsens, more and more details reveal themselves in the wallpaper’s motif, such as bars appearing over the woman in the wall, a reflection of the bars on the narrator’s own windows (153, 32). When the narrator begins to be driven mad by her solitude, the woman she sees in the wall begins shaking the bars that trap her, further representing her own struggle with confinement (189). However, when the narrator begins seeing the woman in the wall, her own well-being has declined to a point where she cannot distinguish between her thoughts and reality causing the woman in the wall to be viewed as a completely separate entity from her

Lindo gives up the vision that she has of her daughter and what she can teach her. Lindo has the idea that she can teach Waverly “American circumstances and Chinese character.” She wants Waverly to take advantage of being in America but still respect her mom and have the Chinese morals that she grew up with. But Lindo questions her vision when she asks herself “How could I know these two things do not mix?” Lindo continues to feel the hurt of losing this when she sees how much her daughter has changed and moved away from the Chinese girl that Lindo envisioned.

One can claim that the narrator was only trying to break free from her husband who was kept her confined in the room or the house like a prisoner. Her husband, John, forced her to be in that room and would not allow her to write in a journal or go outside of the room. As she wrote in her journal about her daily life along with her analysis of the wallpaper, she escapes into an imaginative world whereas writing about the wallpaper was a stress reliever for her. This can best described when she proclaims that, “I don’t feel able. And I know John would think it absurd.

However, the title itself is symbolic. The rose represents the idea of love, since young lovers often give each other roses to express their affections. With so many suitors in her youth, it seems obvious that Emily will accept a rose from one of them, but she never does. When Homer Baron, a construction worker, comes into Emily's life he brings forth hope into her

In the novel, The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator and her husband move into a marvelous house. The narrator suffers from depression and is ordered by her husband to get plenty of rest and is not allowed to work and write. Despite her husband’s orders, the narrator begins to write in her secret journal. In her journal, the narrator describes the house. At first, her descriptions of the house where positive with minor disturbances like the bars on the window and the “rings and things” in the walls, but is then specifically disturbed by the yellow wallpaper in the room. Because she was not allowed to write, the narrator becomes good at hiding her journal. Weeks pass and the narrator becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper. She fantasizes and begins to see images in the wallpaper. For example, “two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down”, and is later convinced that there is a woman trapped behind the wallpaper. In her writings, the narrator mentions that she would see the woman trying to break free by shaking the bars at night and roaming around the wallpaper in the day. On her last day in the house, the narrator decides to lock herself in the room and peel of the wallpaper from the walls in order to set the woman free. When her husband breaks into the locked room, he is horrified by what he has seen. The narrator creeps around the room, “I’ve got out at last in spite of you and Jane”, the narrator said. Her husband faints, yet she continues to creep around the room non-stop

A Rose for Emily was written by William Faulkner, the story was written to show how the South has evolved, furthermore it is about a woman named Emily who refuses to accept change, as change is happening all around her. Emily is stuck in her ways and she functions as a symbol of the Old South as the town around her becomes more civilized and developed.

Another important character from the story is Homer Barron, a man who develops an interest in Miss Emily, “Presently we began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable” (519). According to the story, it seems that the whole town was thinking they would get married: “She will marry him” “She will persuade him yet” (520). However, Miss Emily ends up killing Homer by poisoning him. There seems to be two reasons why she did it. One is that she wanted to marry him, but it appears he refused. The other one is that he might be homosexual: “he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elk’s Club, that he was not a marrying man” (520). All these speculations about the principal characters Emily and Homer have one questioning what the narrator’s intention towards them was really. “The narrator wants to trap us in the speculations made about Emily’s and Homer’s characters by making us believe that Emily will kill herself or that Homer is homosexual” (Wallace). He might be right on this statement because this is what one is most likely thinking about through the reading.

However, the main character is confined to the top room, which is labeled as a nursery. This symbolizes the idea that the narrator is indeed being treated as a child and is confined literally and figuratively in her life. The room resembles a jail like setting despite its label as a nursery. She says, “I lie here on this great immoveable bed- it is nailed down, I believe…” (309). Not only is the bed nailed to the floor, but the bars on the window further lead you to believe that she is being trapped inside of this room. Being left in this room all day and night leads the narrator no other option then to ponder her thoughts and lose herself in the wallpaper. She begins to find new patterns in the wallpaper that were not there the day before. The narrator says, “I didn’t realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman” (311). At the beginning of the story, she only sees lines and patterns that irritate her. By the end of the story, she is finding comfort in the idea that there in a woman who is trapped inside the